Scams

Scams

by Mike Masnick




Spammers Use Spyware To Trick You Into Opening Spam

from the sneaky-sneaky dept

The war over spam keeps escalating, and it's pretty obvious that the spammers have been winning in many cases. Once they figured out how to get Trojans onto computer, creating their own virtual spamming super computer, spammers have adopted this method for most of the spam they send out. However, they're now adopting another net.annoyance to piss everyone off. They're using spyware to get personal details about you that they can then use to get you to open their spam messages. In other words, they're doing some keylogging, not necessarily to get your credit card and bank account info (not that they wouldn't mind that info, of course), but to put the name of your children or your dog into the subject line, making it much more likely that you'll open the spam message. Of course, it seems they didn't consider the next step, which is that it also makes it much less likely that someone will actually buy. By tricking them into opening such a message, spammers will tend to both creep people out and piss them off. That's usually not the best sales combination.

5 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

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  1. Jun 22nd, 2004 @ 1:41pm

    No Subject Given

    by Joe Schmoe

    This is so not necessary. Why not just load the message with random names along with all of the other random bullshit. It's all a hit and miss game anyway...

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. Jun 22nd, 2004 @ 4:36pm

    No Subject Given

    by Anonymous Coward

    The latest spam trick I've seen is to spoof the return address with my address. Thus it looks like I sent mail to myself. Maybe that works to get through the filters, and maybe it works on people with alzheimers, but it certainly doesn't work on me.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  3. Jun 23rd, 2004 @ 2:21am

    BS

    by Ed

    I call BS on this. Sure, if a message had a subject with your pet's name, you might open it, but just how does any spyware determine which sequence among the ten billion characters stored on your computer's disk is your cat's name? It's not like there's a standard registry entry for that, and it would be much easier to search for things that fit regular patterns, such as credit card numbers, or that go into well-defined fields in web page forms, such as username/password combinations.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  4. Jun 23rd, 2004 @ 8:38am

    i don't like spam

    by eponymous geek

    REFINAN.CE AND ENLARGEN YOUR PRESCR!PTION

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  5. Jul 4th, 2006 @ 6:30am

    sdasaa

    by toon

    asdasasd

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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